Memoirs

by Tennessee Williams

  In Rome in the winter of 1948 there were very few private vehicles on the street and soon after settling into my apartment on Via Aurora I purchased an old jeep from a GI being sent back to the States. Among other disabilities, it had a defective muffler and as it raced up Via Veneto, it sounded like a jet plane taking off. Everyone along the street would stare furiously at me as I roared by. On nights when Rafaello was not in attendance, I had the practice of staying up till dawn in this jeep, up to no good. At dawn I would drive over to St. Peter’s, “molto umbriaco,” which means drunk as hell, and I would race the jeep through the wind-blown fountains to cool my head, I would race round and round a fountain until I was thoroughly soaked and then would head home.

  As traffic in Rome is now, it would have taken an hour to return from this exhilarating excursion at daybreak. Very often I would not be alone in the jeep, and my companion would not be quite so hilarious about the dousing as I’d be. But then, in those days, an Americano could get away with a whole lot …

  Toward early spring of ’48, some well-known or notorious Americans began to appear on the Roman scene.

  One evening at a dinner party given either by Henry McIlhenny of Philadelphia, the famous curator of art, or by Sam Barber, the celebrated composer, in a baroque apartment at the American Academy—I met young Gore Vidal. He had just published a bestseller, called The City and the Pillar, which was one of the first homosexual novels of consequence. I had not read it but I knew that it had made the bestseller lists and that it dealt with a “forbidden subject.”

  Gore was a handsome kid, about twenty-four, and I was quite taken by his wit as well as his appearance. We found that we had interests in common and we spent a lot of time together. Please don’t imagine that I am suggesting that there was a romance. We merely enjoyed conversation and a lot of laughter together and we made some trips in the jeep to places on the “Divina Costiera” such as Sorrento and Amalfi.

  I believe we also went to Florence that season and were entertained by that marvelous old aesthete Berenson.

  And then one afternoon Gore took me to the Convent of the Blue Nuns to meet the great philosopher and essayist, by then an octogenarian and semi-invalid, Santayana. He seemed like a saintly old gentleman. He had warm brown eyes of infinite understanding and delicate humor and he seemed to accept his condition without the least bit of self-pity or chagrin. It made me, this meeting, a little more at ease with mankind and certainly less apprehensive about how the close of a creative life might be. His gentleness of presence, his innate kindliness, reminded me very strongly of my grandfather.

  77. Magnani preceding tempest at a Roman night club. All hell was about to break loose—Magnani was in a rage at her escort. I knew it and was amused.

  78. With Visconti. He called me Blanche, as we prepared the Roman production of Streetcar.

  79. Frankie.

  80. Outside the studio in Key West, when it was new and before landscaping. I work everywhere—but I work best here.

  81. Reflecting inside the Key West studio, during the fifties.

  82. On the porch in Key West—a duplicate of a photo I gave to Andreas Brown, who supplied me with books during the dark period of the sixties.

  83. The writing desk in Key West.

  84. In the New York apartment, with “Buffo” and Frankie.

  85. With Grandfather, and “Mr. Moon,” in the earliest, happiest days in Key West.

  86. Key West, 1947. Miriam Hopkins and Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway are second and third from left in the front row. I’m behind Pauline.

  87. With Gore Vidal in Key West in the 1950’s. We had many jokes together in the old days.

  88. The little house in Key West, when I first bought it.

  89. Frank Merlo on the beach in Key West.

  90. Anna and me in the dining room at Key West, 1950.

  “Sometimes I’ve seen God in old faces,” said Hannah Jelkes. I think of Grandfather’s face and Santayana’s—and Grand’s …

  Then that spring an old friend arrived with a companion, and the three of us, accompanied by a shameless Australian, picked up some Roman boys selling cigarettes on the black market and we drove them out in my jeep to the wilds of the Villa Borghese. There we parked the jeep and each of us disappeared into the wilds with one of the young cigarette kids.

  It was more of a lark than a genuinely decadent occasion. It led, however, to my third night in jail.

  Last evening I returned once again to “the boards” in Small Craft Warnings, and I have just written Maureen Stapleton a “thank you” note and will send her roses for advancing my career in the performing arts. I called her up on stage with me, as I simply couldn’t face another of the symposia I’ve been conducting after the performances, and the dear girl came up and read cold with me the part of Bessie—I read Flora—in that funny little skit called A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot.

  It’s getting a bit wearing, in my state of health, to keep attempting to resuscitate ticket sales at this Off-Broadway offering. However, I must face the fact that if it doesn’t get through the summer, or most of the summer, my chances of getting a first-rate production for Out Cry will be further compromised. Peter Glenville and I have worked on the collation of a final script for Out Cry the past two days.

  Rome, 1948. My first year in the golden city. It was getting into summer, and I had a professional commitment in London, no less an event than the first appearance of Helen Hayes in the theatre of London—and in Menagerie.

  So over I went for rehearsals, which were conducted under John Gielgud. At first things seemed promising. Miss Hayes is not, in my minority opinion, one of the world’s most gifted performers. I suppose in her youth she must have been very attractive and even quite accomplished. But as long ago as 1940, when I was in New York for Battle of Angels and she was appearing for the Theatre Guild in the Shakespearean role of Rosalind, I overheard some light-man saying, “You just can’t light her, she’s not possible to light.” But I like the lady as a lady and I admire her off-stage style.

  By 1948 she had been sensible enough to forsake all ingénue roles and was doing very well in parts that suited her age. Her husband was in England with her. I think they loved each other. Perhaps I should underline think, to stress the fact that this is just a conjecture. There’s something a bit suspicious about the decline of Charlie into drunkenness coexisting in time with his wife’s indomitable advance to the status of “First Lady of the American Theatre.” However, be that as it may, the great Gielgud has never been, I’d say, much of a director, but Miss Hayes should not have happened to John. During the first couple of weeks of rehearsal, she played legitimately without any of those simian grimaces that have come lately upon her. She was moving in rehearsals and giving an honest performance of Amanda Wingfield, the mother in Menagerie.

  We went to Brighton, where we were to open. At one of the last rehearsals Miss Hayes summoned Gielgud and me and her supporting cast into her dressing room, and after an ominously long silence, she declared, “At this point in the making of a play, I know if it will go or it won’t go.”

  More silence.

  Then Miss Hayes slowly and sorrowfully shook her little head, meaning that the prognosis for the attraction was negative.

  I took her word for it. I stayed for the opening in Brighton. The performance was pancake flat and her whole bag of tricks didn’t help the “First Lady.”

  I remember meeting E. M. Forster after a performance there in Brighton. He came to Miss Hayes’s dressing room and she cried out, “Oh, Passage to India!”

  Well as I’ve said, off-stage Miss Hayes was and certainly still is a lady of presence and grace.

  Seeing that the play was doomed to disaster, I flew back to Paris, where Gore was staying at the Hôtel de l’Université on the Left Bank. I took a nice suite there. It was a raffish hotel but it suited Gore and me perfectly as there was no objection to young callers.

  At that time our favorite haunts were the Boeuf
sur le Toit and certain bohemian night clubs on the Left Bank. I met Cocteau and Bésé Bérard and Jean Marais, and quite a lot of artists, but I was most interested in meeting Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existential philosophy appealed to me strongly, as did his play Huit Clos.

  I decided to give a big party in my room at the Hôtel de l’Université.

  It was attended by most of my celebrated new friends in Paris. But I kept waiting for Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I had invited by wire. Off and on during the evening, I received bulletins concerning him. He was just around the corner in the bar of the Hôtel Rond-Point and people kept assuring me that he would show up. He never did.

  I suppose he regarded me as too bourgeois or American or God knows what, but he did not appear at my party.

  Menagerie was about to open in London and that great hostess, Lady Sibyl, had planned a big bash in the nature of an opening night party.

  Mother was there with Dakin, and all the eminent London actors were there.

  I kept sending wires, at first assuring them that I was going to be there. But something prevented my attendance. I never left Paris for the event, which is an embarrassing thing to look back on. At the last moment I wired Mother and Gielgud and Miss Hayes that I had taken ill in Paris, though actually I was feeling exceptionally well.

  I believe that I was enjoying a little affaire de coeur, as usual.

  When I had parted with Rafaello in Rome, it had been understood between us that I would return the following fall and meanwhile I was sending him monthly checks of a hundred dollars.

  Well, I got the London notices on Menagerie from a very delightful young lady, a friend I’d made during the rehearsals in London, Maria Britneva, now the Lady St. Just. I met her at John Gielgud’s and we immediately hit it off together. A girl she was then, a very attractive one, three quarters white Russian, and one quarter English. She and her mother were impoverished, living upon Mme. Britneva’s meager earnings for translations from Russian literature and from Maria’s equally meager income as an occasional actress. We became great friends and are still great friends—she was so honest and beautiful, and still remains so. She was an actress until she married the Lord St. Just, then she became the Lady St. Just.

  (I will write more about Maria later.)

  Maria sent me all the London notices and they were very good for Miss Hayes and very bad for the play. I remember one was headed with this caption: “Bad Play Well-Acted.”

  I was not particularly surprised, having seen the rehearsals and the Brighton break-in.

  About a week after the play’s London opening—having soon to return to the States for the Broadway production of Summer and Smoke—I passed briefly through London. Gore came along. We had a good time despite the gloom at the theatre. I saw a performance and it was just as bad as I had expected. Menagerie can’t be tricked. It has to be honestly and more than competently performed and directed.

  Truman Capote was also in England. He returned with me to the States on the Queen Mary and it was an hilariously funny crossing. In those days Truman was about the best companion you could want. He had not turned bitchy. Well, he had not turned maliciously bitchy. But he was full of fantasies and mischief. We used to go along the first class corridors of the Mary and pick up the gentlemen’s shoes, set outside their staterooms for shining—and we would mix them all up, set them doors away from their proper places.

  And then there was that alcoholic Episcopalian bishop.

  I do not feel particularly elated this morning since last night I resumed my symposium after the performances of Small Craft Warnings. I made an unfortunate attempt to hold the audience with a reading of one of my best short plays, The Frosted Glass Coffin, a play admired by Paul Bowles. I warned the audiences that the play was a piece of rather depressing material since it dealt with the fate of retired citizens, very senior, living at a hotel called the Ponce de Leon in Miami. I told them that, if the play did not interest them, they should feel entirely at liberty to walk out. To my distress, the greater part of them chose this option.

  However, among those who remained was my old friend, the director José Quintero, and his faithful friend Nicky. We dined at P. J. Clarke’s.

  Back to the perhaps familiar story of Truman Capote and the hard-drinking Episcopalian bishop on the Queen Mary, that late summer crossing in 1948.

  We had scarcely left Southampton when Truman began to notice that a portly and bibulous bishop was popping up unexpectedly almost everywhere Truman went. I began to notice it, too. We would hardly sit down at a bar on the ship when in would come the Bishop, less steadily than the calm ocean and the seaworthy vessel could possibly account for. He would cast a glazed and anxious look about the bar. Then his eyes would light up as he spotted little Truman crouching before the bar, hoping to escape the attention of this eminent churchman. No luck, never, none, whatsoever. The Bishop would invariably spot us, the gloom would disappear from his round face and he would fairly plunge at the nearest bar stool, close to those occupied by Truman and me. Or if we were at a table or at a seat in the movie auditorium, he would plump himself down (quite uninvited, needless to say) or would heave into an adjoining seat. So it went for half the crossing.

  A dreadful confrontation between the Bishop and Truman was unmistakably impending and down it came like a bolt from heaven.

  Truman and I were seated vis-à-vis at a table for two in the dining salon. With apparitional abruptness, the Bishop had drawn up a chair between us and started to engage us in conversation. His motive was not of an evangelistic nature. I mean not in the usual sense. Truman had declared himself quite uninterested in any church of any denomination.

  On this evening, Truman began to stare at the Bishop’s massive ring.

  “You know,” he drawled sweetly to the Bishop, “I’ve always wanted to have a bishop’s ring.”

  The Bishop chuckled indulgently.

  “A bishop’s ring is only available to a bishop,” I think was his answer.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” countered Truman, “it occurred to me that maybe I might find one in a pawnshop. You know, one that had been hocked by a defrocked bishop.”

  He drawled out “defrocked bishop” in a way that left no doubt of his implication. The bishop turned redder than usual and excused himself from the table and we were not disturbed by his persistent approaches for the rest of the voyage.

  The voyage terminated, of course, in the harbor of New York. Margo Jones was at the dock to meet me. She had already found an apartment for me and I think it was the loveliest of the three or four apartments I’ve occupied over the years in New York City. It was the one designed and decorated by the now famous sculptor Tony Smith, who had been a close friend of mine since 1941—I was “best man” at his wedding to Jane Lawrence, the singer, in 1943, when I was “working” for MGM, where Jane was making a rather hapless film in which she was fatally miscast. Her middle name was Lanier; we were distantly related, it seemed. In any case we had become, we are now, quite close friends.

  The apartment was on East Fifty-eighth between Lexington and Third avenues. A three-story brownstone, façade freshly painted white and gray. The interior of the first-floor apartment was Tony’s creation and he had created it for another old friend, Buffie Johnson, the painter. The apartment had a huge workroom in the middle, the height of two stories. Back of that great studio was a little patio full of exotic plants watered by a small fountain. It was kept at a low temperature so that the glass walls which enclosed it were always frosted over: it looked, from the studio and bedroom beyond it, like a small submarine garden. As for the bedroom, it was a piece of enchantment. Buffie’s sign was Aquarius and the bedroom was full of water things. An illuminated aquarium, a great assortment of sea shells, and driftwood and old fishing-nets. The bed was huge, and marvelously comfortable—perfectly designed for the activities that it was soon to support …

  Margo Jones was a dear friend at this time and getting me this dream place to live in was about the
loveliest thing she could have done for me in her sadly brief lifetime.

  Rehearsals were soon to begin on Summer and Smoke, which Margo had produced at her arena theatre in Dallas. I attributed the Dallas production’s remarkable absence of artistry to the fact that the play was, in my opinion at that time, not a good one and the leading roles had been unhappily cast, Miss Alma Winemiller being played by a very tall, skinny girl with a Bronx accent and exceptionally large front teeth.

  However, Mr. Brooks Atkinson caught the Dallas production and, for some reason still unfathomable to me, he found the play enchanting. He wrote it up in the New York Times. Margo was ecstatic at this premature notice. Of course Margo seemed almost always to be ecstatic over something and this condition was not always unrelated to a taste for whiskey.

  For the New York production, we procured the services of Margaret Phillips and Todd Andrews for the parts of Miss Alma and the young doctor. Miss Phillips was an exquisite fresh-faced, tilt-nosed young ingénue of Welsh origin; Mr. Andrews was exceptionally handsome but not so talented, I regret to say.

  Now you may think, perhaps correctly, that I am a total ingrate when I say that in my opinion Margo Jones should have confined herself to a regional theatre, preferably in the executive and fund-raising departments. But I think it was there that her genius lay, not in the direction of actors or of delicate plays.

  We were scarcely past the first week of rehearsals when I had or began to have depressing premonitions about the venture. An actor or actress would approach the ecstatic Margo with a question such as “How do you want me to play this bit, Miss Jones?”